Boil 2 calves' heads in salted water until tender; then cut the meat from the bone. Fry 1 dozen small peeled onions and 3 potatoes, cut into dice pieces; stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour and the sauce in which the meat was cooked. Let boil up, add the sliced meat, 1 teaspoonful of paprica and salt to taste; let all cook together fifteen minutes, then serve very hot.
A late-Habsburg household dish rather than the beef Gulasch most people expect: the meat is boiled calves' head, and the paprika goes in at the very end. Two heads is a great deal of food, so scale before you shop.
- Calves' headsA whole scalded calf's head, split, is a special order from a halal or Latin American butcher and yields cheek, jowl, tongue and gelatinous skin. Two of them feed twelve to sixteen. For a household portion, one head or about 3 lb of veal cheek and shank with a piece of tongue gives the same texture and richness.
- Preparing the headIf you do use the whole head, it needs rinsing and a soak in cold water to draw blood, and the brains removed and cooked separately if wanted. Blanch, drain, then simmer in fresh salted water; skim the scum for the first ten minutes or the broth turns muddy.
- Until tenderExpect 2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer, not a boil. The meat is done when a skewer slides through the cheek without resistance and the skin is soft enough to cut with a spoon.
- PapricaRead this as sweet Hungarian paprika, and a teaspoon is timid for this quantity of meat. Stir it into the onions off the heat before the liquid goes in; paprika scorches in hot fat within seconds and turns bitter.
- The flour and the sauceCook the tablespoon of flour in the onion fat for a minute or two, then add the strained cooking broth gradually. A tablespoon will only lightly thicken a pint of broth; for a larger volume of sauce increase it proportionally or reduce the broth instead.
- The potatoesDiced potato that has only been briefly fried may still be raw in the middle. Either simmer the dice in the sauce for the full fifteen minutes, or start them earlier and add the meat for the last five so it does not fall apart.
- Seasoning and finishBoiled head is bland on its own. Caraway, a crushed garlic clove, marjoram and a splash of vinegar at the end are standard in Austrian Gulasch and pull the dish together. Serve with boiled potatoes, noodles or dumplings.
Gulyás is Hungarian for herdsman, and the word attached to a meat stew cooked in a kettle over open fires on the Great Plain; the paprika seems to have come to it later. As it travelled to Vienna under the Habsburgs it became Gulasch, generally onion-heavy and thickened rather than soupy. Paprika became central to the cooking of the region over the course of the nineteenth century, as Hungarian mills ground it on a commercial scale, and by 1900 a teaspoon of it was enough to make a dish read as "Austrian" to an English-speaking cook. What is more revealing here is the cut: a calf's head was cheap, gelatinous and common in Central European kitchens, appearing in soups, salads and stews long after Anglo-American cooks had lost the habit. This book gives one dish per day of the year, each pinned to a country, and its opening entry is a fair sample of how loosely those national labels sat on the food.